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Documentaries, Docudramas, and Perceptual Beliefs”

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Documentaries, Docudramas, and Perceptual Beliefs” Terrone, Enrico (2020) “Documentaries, Docudramas, and Perceptual Beliefs”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1): 39-51 1 Documentaries, Docudramas, and Perceptual Beliefs Introduction Some twenty years ago, Gregory Currie and Noël Carroll engaged in an insightful discussion on the nature of documentaries. Currie (1999, 2000, 2001) proposed an account based on the notion of trace while Carroll (1997, 2000) centered his on the notion of assertion. As pointed out by Carl Plantinga (2005, 105), both these accounts help us to better understand what a documentary is but “fail as traditional definitions of the documentary”. Plantinga thus proposes an account that aims to combine the explanatory power of Currie’s and Carroll’s thereby solving their respective problems. Still, I contend, there remains a crucial issue to be addressed, namely, differentiating the documentary from the docudrama, which Currie (1999, 295) characterizes as “the re-creation, by dramatic means, of certain actually occurring events”. In this paper I shall propose a new account of the documentary that is based on perceptual beliefs instead of on assertions or traces. I shall argue that this account can distinguish the documentary from the docudrama more effectively than its predecessors. In order to properly appreciate a film about certain actually occurring events, one should know whether this film is a documentary or a docudrama. One should be aware, for instance, that films such as All the President’s Men (1976), The Doors (1991), No (2012) are docudramas whereas films such as High School (1968), In the Land of the Deaf (1992), Capturing the Friedmans (2003) are documentaries.i That is because in the relevant appreciative practice documentaries and docudramas are governed by different norms of appreciation that are inherent in these categories.ii Thus, an account of the documentary that aims to comply with the relevant appreciative practice should take the distinction between documentaries and docudramas into account. This is what I shall do in this paper. After presenting the analytic debate on documentaries in § 1, and after introducing the notion of relevant appreciative practice in § 2, I shall argue, in § 3, that both Carroll’s and Plantinga’s accounts fail in complying with the the relevant appreciative practice as regards the distinction between the documentary and the docudrama. Currie, instead, succeeds in differentiating the documentary from the docudrama by means of the notion of trace. Yet, this notion leads him to deny the status of documentary not only to docudramas but also to certain films that are usually appreciated as documentaries. This makes his account also at odds with the relevant appreciative practice. Is there a way to differentiate documentaries from docudramas without resorting to the notion of trace? I propose to address this issue by relying on the notion of perceptual belief, which I shall introduce in § 4 and exploit in §§ 5-6 in order to properly distinguish the documentary from 2 the docudrama. In §§ 7-10, I shall develop this account and defend it from possible objections. In § 11, I shall draw my conclusions. 1. Traces and Assertions Currie characterizes a documentary as a film about a subject that predominantly exploits photographic traces of that subject. “About”, here, designates an intentional relationship: the filmmaker intended to foreground something, namely the subject (often indicated by the title), about which she communicates information and possibly opinions. “Of”, instead, designates a causal relationship: the photographic apparatus recorded things on whose appearance photographic traces counterfactually depend; if those things had not been so, these traces would not have been so. For instance, The Armstrong Lie (2013) is a documentary because it is about cyclist Lance Armstrong and exploits photographic traces of Armstrong, whereas The Program (2015) is not a documentary but rather a docudrama because it is about Armstrong but exploits photographic traces of Ben Foster, the actor who plays Armstrong in this film.iii Still, some films that we usually treat as documentaries are about their subjects and yet do not exploits photographic traces of those subjects. This is what usually happens when a documentary is about an “out-of-reach” subject, that is, a subject that cannot be filmed, as for instance the life of Napoleon, the extinction of dinosaurs or the origin of the universe. Furthermore, Currie’s account can hardly deal with those documentaries – like the classic ones by Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, and Humphrey Jennings – that heavily exploit reenactment, that is, the practice of resorting to filmed reconstructions of past events. In Jinhee Choi’s (2001, 317) terms, “Currie rejects documentaries with performances or reenactments as proper documentaries, since they are not literal traces of people and events that a film is concerned with”. In fact, a reenacted scene is about a certain event but is not a trace of that event; rather, it is a trace of the reenactment itself.iv On the other hand, Carroll can accommodate out-of-reach subjects and reenactment by conceiving of a documentary as a film that makes assertions, that is, uses images and sounds to articulate a propositional content to whom the audience is meant to respond by forming beliefs having that content.v Thus, an alleged documentary about an out-of-reach subject actually is a documentary because it makes assertions about that subject even though it does not exhibit traces of that subject. For instance, a documentary can make assertions about dinosaurs even though it does not exhibit traces of dinosaurs. Likewise, Carroll’s account can accommodate reenactment because a reenacted scene makes assertions about a certain event even though it does not exhibit traces of that event, but only of its reenactment. 3 Still, according to Plantinga, Carroll’s account finds it hard to accommodate what Bill Nichols (2001) calls the “observational documentary mode”. While documentaries in the “expository mode” explicitly make assertions, often by means of a voice-over narrator, documentaries in the “observational mode” limit themselves to showing us events. For instance, D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) is a documentary about Bob Dylan that shows his 1965 concert tour in England rather than making assertions about him.vi A metaphor that is often used to characterize the “observational mode” is the fly on the wall, which suggests that the filmmaker limits herself to observing the events filmed as if she was a fly on a wall in the place where these events occur. In fact, flies do not make assertions and so filmmakers that behave like flies do not make assertions either. In order to solve this problem, Plantinga proposes to conceive of documentaries as films that can make not only canonical assertions about their subjects but also peculiar meta-representational assertions about themselves. Although a documentary in the observational mode does not explicitly make assertions about its subject, it implicitly asserts something about itself, namely, “that the use of motion pictures and recorded sounds offer an audiovisual array that communicates some phenomenological aspect of the subject, from which the spectator might reasonably be expected to form a sense of that phenomenological aspect and/or form true beliefs about that subject” (Plantinga 2005, 111). Going back to our metaphor, the fly on the wall does not make assertions and yet the filmmaker can assert that she is behaving like a fly on the wall. 2. The Relevant Appreciative Practice Since the beginning of the paper I have claimed that the relevant appreciative practice draws a distinction between documentaries and docudrama, and I am going to rely on this distinction in order to criticize Carroll’s and Plantinga’s accounts of the documentary. Still, before going into this, the notion of relevant appreciative practice requires some clarification. According to a view which is gaining more and more consensus in contemporary aesthetics, art appreciation is a sort of social game governed by norms that usually remain implicit in a network of shared attitudes such as beliefs, intentions and expectations.vii An important task of the philosophy of art consists in trying to make such norms as explicit as possible. In this sense, the philosophy of art contributes to an investigation on culture (the realm of norms) that has interesting analogies with the investigation on nature (the realm of facts) carried out by science and scientifically minded metaphysics. Just as the latter disciplines aim to “carve nature at the joints” (Sider 2011, 3), the philosophy of art aims to carve culture at the joints. 4 Specifically, I conceive of works of art as essentially social and normative entities that can be traced back to the category of “public artifacts”, which Amie Thomasson (2014, 47) characterizes in these terms: “While all artifacts are indeed mind dependent, public artifacts do not depend merely on the individual intentions of their makers; they also depend on public norms”. Following Wybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas (2010, 7), I conceive of the public norm on which a public artifact depends as the “use plan” that prescribes how to use it. While use plans of technical artifacts are quite often made explicit by user manuals, those of works of art tend to remain implicit in networks of shared attitudes. Assuming that the primary use of works of art consists in their appreciation, I call “appreciative practices” the networks of attitudes that establish their use plans. In particular, I call “relevant appreciative practice” the network of attitudes that establishes the use plans that are relevant to a specific form of art.viii Since documentaries and docudramas basically are films, the appreciative practice that is relevant to them is the network of attitudes that establishes the use plan of films. Outstanding works in the philosophy of film such as Currie’s (1995), Carroll’s (2008) and Gaut’s (2010) can be seen as attempts to make that use plan explicit.
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